release

Tarski 3.2.0 adds the option to display a post’s featured image in the header. It also improves Tarski’s compatibility with recent versions of WordPress and PHP. A full list of changes can be found in the changelog.

We strongly recommend following the upgrade guide. Always back up your files and database before running a WordPress or Tarski upgrade. Please ensure that you upgrade WordPress before installing the new version of Tarski.

Featured images in the header

Featured images let you customise how a post or page appears. Tarski now allows you to swap out the usual header image above the site title for a post or page’s featured image. This post shows the feature in action: it uses the ‘Splatter’ header image that comes with Tarski instead of the usual site header.

Other stuff

Apart from that, this is mostly a maintenance release. It cleans up a few bits of code and improves Tarski’s compatibility with recent versions of PHP and WordPress. Translators will be happy to hear that the theme POT file is now available with the source code.

Let me know in the comments if you run into any bugs. Hope you enjoy the new release.

We strongly recommend following the upgrade guide. Always back up your files and database before running a WordPress or Tarski upgrade. Please ensure that you upgrade WordPress before installing the new version of Tarski.

WordPress 3.3 compatibility

Tarski 3.1 was released to add support for new features in WordPress 3.2, but WordPress 3.3 didn’t add many relevant features so I haven’t done a new major release, but merely fixed a few niggles. This includes fixing a few warnings, removing some invalid HTML, and making the host site name in the footer work correctly when the multi-site functionality is engaged.

Developers working with Tarski—for example, anyone writing a child theme—will be happy to know that the TARSKI_DEBUG constant can now be set by external code such as child themes or plugins. Amongst other things, this should make it easier to debug issues with Tarski’s JavaScript and CSS when writing code that interacts with it.

Tarski 3.1 is now available for download. It includes sub-menu support in the navbar, together with JavaScript-enhanced dropdowns to display them. For a full list of changes please consult the changelog.

We strongly recommend following the upgrade guide. Always back up your files and database before running a WordPress or Tarski upgrade. Please ensure that you upgrade WordPress before installing the new version of Tarski.

Sub-menu dropdowns

This was definitely the most requested feature I’ve had in a while. I have some usability objections to dropdown menus, and played around with an alternative in the RC, but in the end I’ve gone for a more traditional approach. Mouse over the links in this site’s navbar for a demo of the new functionality.

Please note that they don’t work wonderfully well in Internet Explorer 6. If you want to use Tarski with dropdown sub-menus and you absolutely have to support IE6, I’m happy to commit any patches you provide.

Other changes

Apart from that, most of the changes in this version–although they are substantial–are under the hood, and involve cleaning up the code, removing deprecated functionality, and replacing Tarski-specific code with calls to new WordPress APIs. I’m always happy to be able to remove code without removing functionality, and I always feel that it’s a vindication when WordPress core implements some feature that Tarski has had for a while.

I should note that I’ve replaced all of Tarski’s JavaScript with new jQuery-powered code, and consequently those parts of Tarski now require jQuery. Given how widespread its use is now, and that WordPress itself depends on it, I don’t feel this is too onerous a dependency.

Finally, a small apology for taking so long to release this version. I’ve been really busy this summer and although the code’s been ready to go for ages, I couldn’t find time to run a final set of tests until today. As usual, if you spot any bugs please post them in the comments.

With today’s release of WordPress 3.2, I thought it would be good to get an updated version of Tarski out as soon as possible. To that end, here’s a release candidate build of Tarski 3.1.0.

There are a few changes from the beta version, the most obvious of which is the navigation, which now uses a more traditional dropdown style. As I’ve said before, this is not really to my taste, and has obvious usability problems for user agents without hover, but it seems to be what people want. I may release the expanding navbar code as a plugin for those who prefer it.

WordPress 3.2 is required to run this build of Tarski. If you try to use it with WordPress 3.1 or earlier it will throw errors and make your site unusable.

With the imminent release of WordPress 3.2, I thought it was time to get the new build of Tarski out there so people can test it and let me know of any issues before the final release.

The usual caveats apply: this is pre-release software and as such may be buggy and unpolished. As such, I don’t recommend installing it on a production site; it’s strictly for testing at this point (although I am actually running it here). WordPress 3.2 RC2 is required, if you try to install the Tarski 3.1.0 beta on a site running WordPress 3.1 or any earlier version it will throw errors.

The major new feature in this release is support for sub-menus. I’m not much of a fan of drop-downs—they violate any number of accessibility and usability tenets—so instead I’ve gone with an expand/collapse mechanism to hide and reveal the full menu structure.

Of course, this may not be to everyone’s liking, but Tarski’s API is pretty flexible, and it’s not much work to add an alternative menu control. If there’s anything I can do to make writing extensions of this sort easy, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Tarski 3.0 is now available to install at your leisure. It adds support for new WordPress features like menus, default headers and the ‘aside’ post format. A detailed list of changes is available in the changelog. Please note that WordPress 3.1 is required for this release.

We strongly recommend following the upgrade guide. Always back up your files and database before running a WordPress or Tarski upgrade. Please ensure that you upgrade WordPress before installing the new version of Tarski.

WordPress menus

Tarski 3.0 removes the built-in menu functionality in favour of the core WordPress menu feature. This means that after you install the new version of Tarski you’ll need to reconstruct your site’s navbar. Just go to Appearance > Menus in the WordPress admin panel, create a new menu, and add it to the Tarski navbar.

Header images

Headers are also now selected entirely outside the theme. Tarski registers all its current headers as default headers which you can select from the Appearance > Header page in the WordPress admin panel, so if you were using one of the built-in headers, or had added your own to the /headers directory in Tarski or a child theme, you will need to re-select it from there. If you were using a custom header you had uploaded yourself, you don’t need to change anything.

Tarski 2.7 adds compatibility with many WordPress 3.0 features, including custom backgrounds. A detailed list of changes is available in the changelog. Please note that WordPress 3.0 is required for this release.

We strongly recommend following the upgrade guide. Always back up your files and database before running a WordPress or Tarski upgrade. Please ensure that you upgrade WordPress before installing the new version of Tarski.

Overriding templates

Child themes can now override many of Tarski’s built-in template fragments. Simply create a file of the appropriate name in the app/templates directory of your child theme (you’ll have to create this) and add a file of the appropriate name—Tarski will use it automatically. For example, you could replace the template Tarski displays when there are no posts by adding a no_posts.php file.

Compressed assets

There are also some client-side performance improvements: the theme’s graphics are slightly better compressed, and minified versions of Tarski’s CSS and JavaScript are served by default. The full stylesheets and JS files are of course included with the theme download, so there’s nothing stopping you changing them and then re-minifying (although I would in general recommend using a custom stylesheet or child theme rather than making changes to the theme directly, as this will hamper your ability to upgrade it).

This release also contains numerous small improvements and bug fixes. There are a lot of WordPress 3.0 releases I just didn’t have time to add support for, but hopefully those can be added before too long. If anyone would like to contribute those changes, please take a look at the outstanding issues and fork the project on GitHub. Hope you enjoy the new version.

Tarski 2.6 brings support for new WordPress features, improves the API, and makes the theme far more amenable to customisation via child themes. A detailed list of changes is available in the changelog. Please note that WordPress 2.9 is required for this release.

We strongly recommend following the upgrade guide. Always back up your files and database before running a WordPress or Tarski upgrade. Please ensure that you upgrade WordPress before installing the new version of Tarski.

Better child themes

Child themes can now support their own custom headers and stylesheets. Simply create your child theme and add your new header images to the headers/ directory in the child theme, rather than in your version of Tarski. The same applies to custom stylesheets. This makes Tarski child themes far more powerful, and allows you to keep all your Tarski customisations in a child theme rather than having to worry about backing up files stored in your Tarski directory as well.

Post thumbnails & image captions

Tarski now supports the post thumbnails added in WordPress 2.9, as well as properly styling the captions added to images in WordPress 2.6.

More customisable navbar

For those of you using the Tarski API to modify the navbar, a couple of enhancements have been added. Firstly, the ‘Home’ and page links are now added to the navbar via the tarski_navbar filter, making it much easier to remove them if need be. Secondly, page and external links added to the navbar now have more meaningful array keys when they are passed to that filter, making them easier to manipulate programmatically.

Now in HTML5

HTML5 is the future of HTML, and using the HTML5 DOCTYPE in Tarski will make it easier to incorporate powerful new features in the future. There was a discussion of where this will lead in the comments on the 2.6 release candidates post.

As usual, there are many more tweaks, bug fixes and new features in Tarski 2.6 than I can go into here. Hope you enjoy the new version.

Tarski 2.1.4 contains a vital compatibility fix for anyone upgrading to WordPress 2.6. If you’re planning on installing WordPress 2.6, install this update immediately, before you upgrade your WordPress installation. Following the upgrade guide is generally a good idea.

Always back up your files and database before running a WordPress or Tarski upgrade.

It appears that options are now being automatically unserialised, which means that when Tarski attempts to unserialise the already-unserialised tarski_options object, an error gets thrown which breaks a bunch of stuff. All of which means, upgrade now, or you might potentially lose your Tarski options.

Tarski 2.2 is still in production, and will add some nice functionality as well as some performance improvements and a fair bit of tidying. I’ve backported a couple of bug-fixes from 2.2 to 2.1.4, so you don’t have to wait for them.

Tarski 2.0.5 was initially slated as a pure bugfix release, but as with most things, it grew in the making. Details are in the changelog.

However, the most major features are the bugs fixed. To begin with, the navbar now reorders correctly, and no longer needs to save that order when pages are saved; more efficient and better-written code makes it all happen dynamically.

A problem with Tarski’s options saving and updating code was exposed by the new multiple authors checking instituted in 2.0.3, with the result that the save-and-restore no longer worked properly: restoring one’s options after deleting them would merely save the defaults to the database. The underlying issues have now been fixed.

On the new features front is one I know I’ll appreciate as I continue to improve Tarski: the code behind the version check is now a lot smarter. It used to just check whether the version grabbed from the stylesheet and the one in the database—now it can tell whether any given version is newer or older than the installed version, which lets us do things like show a notice on the Dashboard notifying the user that they’re using a development version.

Lastly, I appropriated some WordPress widget code to rewrite the recent articles section, with the result that it’s now added via an action hook, th_fmain, and can consequently be removed by a plugin as well as through the Options page. The recent articles’ excerpts also have WordPress’ excerpt filters applied to them too, so any plugin which adds or removes those filters will now work as expected on Tarski’s excerpts.

Enjoy the new version; all being well, it’ll be the last before Tarski 2.1, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it.

I have moved this site to a new server. Unfortunately I don’t have time right now to finish migrating content and debugging everything, but I think a website with a few things missing that’s actually available is much better than one that has all the content but keeps crashing every couple of days. The major […]

Sorry about the recent downtime, the server the site lives on keeps running out of memory. I’m hoping to move it to a newer, better-provisioned one soon but I haven’t had the time to complete the process. In the meantime, thanks to the people who’ve let me know when it’s gone down. I’ll try to […]